The Fourth Estate, Fifth Column

This is a brilliant article on what is happening in this Country right now.


The Fourth Estate as Fifth Column


Gene Lalor
January 13, 2010


Privacy

Our system of government both permits and encourages dissent as long as that dissent is not expressed violently or used as incitements to violence. In those cases, freedoms of speech and of the press can border on sedition and should be supressed to preserve order.



America’s mainstream media, the MSM, may not yet be guilty of sedition but may be guilty of crimes far more reprehensible: giving aid and comfort to the enemy and serving as handmaidens to a repressive government.



The motivations of the MSM are beyond this observer’s comprehension. Even after the president’s grudging acknowledgement that we are engaged in a war with al Qaeda, various elements of our media continue reporting falsehoods and/or concealing truths.



Examples would include continuing to bury facts concerning the Fort Hood murderer’s contacts with al Qaeda as if Major Hasan deserved some media protection, or in order to conceal the scope of Islamic terrorism in America.



More incomprehensible is that it took Obama, this most brilliant of men, over a year to come to the determination that we are engaged in a war against terrorism and, even then, it took an attempted al Qaeda bombing on Christmas Day to provide the catalyst for his concession to reality.



One has to assume that the MSM reporters and editors who consciously conceal relevant information about an avowed enemy are either ignorant of the consequences of defeat in a war, that they for some reason are committed to accomplishing that defeat, or both.



Trying to arrive at some rationale for the state of America’s Fourth Estate and why it is today functioning as a Fifth Column, a group acting in concert to subvert the United States, is a daunting and discouraging enterprise, daunting because it’s not transparent, discouraging because it’s difficult to accept.



A summary of some contemporary thought and context:



The Fourth Estate, a nation’s press and media outlets, functioning as a Fifth Column is not unprecedented in world history although it is in ours, at least for as long as we have been a republic.



Colonial newspapers and periodicals were greatly influential in undermining the force of the Crown in the colonies. Without them our Revolution may never have happened but that was then, when we were struggling for our independence, this is now, when we are struggling against an insidious, worldwide foe.



In the last century, leftist journalists largely representing the international Communist Party worked diligently and tirelessly to subvert the nation from within.



However, Communist publications such as the Daily Worker and the People’s World had little effect on the thinking of the masses because most people understood they represented the radical underbelly of society and their appeal and distribution were confined to equally radical elements.



Enter the modern versions of those publications and the “New Media,” what some have identified as the philosophical progeny of the Communist radicals of the thirties, forties, and fifties.



Long before the U.S.S.R. was soundly defeated in the Cold War, those Marxists and Leninists retreated to the ivy-covered walls of academia where they were free to warp more minds than they ever could through the publications such as the Daily Worker.



And what better route was there to achieve a geometric progression of their influence in academia than through schools of journalism?



There they could mold young minds in their own image and when their acolytes graduated to the real world they would spread leftist propaganda under the guise of being members of the mainstream and thereby subtly brainwash those masses who were beyond the tentacles of overt conversion.



Voila! Today’s MSM!



Evidence of the mainstreamers’ insidious agenda is both clandestine and transparent, covert and overt.



The covert is only hidden from those who choose not to see, those who absorb the MSM propaganda from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, as if it were biblical truth.



Thanks to media self-censorship, those innocents remain ignorant of such trivia as President Obama’s proud declaration of having campaigned in all 57 states and his inability to pronounce the name of the Christmas Day underwear bomber, amusing errors comparable to Bush 43’s mangling of the English language.



Whereas Bush was widely ridiculed as a nincompoop, the flubs of Obama, the media’s darling, are hidden from the public to preserve his messianic aura that same media created.



Manufactured messiahs can’t very well be allowed to screw up.



Much more unsettling, substantive news concerning Obama’s close affiliations with extreme leftists such as Bill Ayers and convicted felons such as Tony Rezko also go unreported or minimized.



Perhaps worse is news presented as objective reporting which is tailored to fit Obama’s needs.



ABC providing a televised bully pulpit for the president to convert unbelievers to the cause of Obamacare last June was a horrendous exhibition of abject surrender of journalistic integrity which ABC reinforced by denying opponents any right of rebuttal.



(See “ABC, Exemplar of a Media that Once Was,” http://bit.ly/4IIiZX)



As legislation to impose socialistic health care on the American people moved forward, the MSM exacerbated its surrender by downplaying the clandestine, closed-door negotiations conducted by the Democrat Party and ignoring Obama’s pledge of the ultimate transparency, live telecasting on C-Span.



The mass media’s abnegation of its responsibility to be fair, reasonable, and objective in domestic matters is a serious breach of journalistic ethics. When that breach extends to foreign affairs during wartime, it becomes a threat to national security, a dangerous Fifth Column in our midst.



None of what today’s mainstream media publish or articulate can be easily categorized as seditious dissent. Much of what is being reported, unreported, and mis-reported can readily be categorized as malicious deception.



The greatest irony is that the more they deceive, the more their readership and viewership abandon them and consign them to journalism’s scrap heap.

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